ESCONDIDO  The mother of a 14-year-old Escondido boy who police said was lured to hop on a Florida-bound plane with a sexual predator wants the man convicted and sent to prison for a long time.

“I hope he gets life, and I want him to know that he really messed with the wrong family,” the mother said Thursday at a news conference at the Escondido police headquarters.

Tony Lee McLeod, 36, is in a Florida jail, arrested Tuesday morning on a kidnapping charge after authorities found him with the teen on a plane as it landed in Tampa. The teen was returned to California on Wednesday.

The boy’s mother and father, whose names were not made public to protect their son’s identity, spoke to reporters in Escondido on the same day that San Diego County prosecutors filed charges against McLeod.

The charges include child abduction, meeting with a minor to commit a sex offense and online enticement of a minor. If convicted, McLeod faces six years and eight months in prison.

Authorities on both coasts are in talks to determine where McLeod will be prosecuted.

He appeared Wednesday in a Florida court where a judge ordered him held without bail. State prosecutors there have 21 days to file formal charges.

An arrest warrant affidavit filed Thursday in Vista Superior Court says that the teen’s family discovered on May 26 the boy was receiving sexually explicit text messages and images from a man on his cellphone. The two had met online.

The boy told his family he had been in contact with the man for about a month, according to the affidavit signed by Escondido police Detective Damian Jackson. The man’s identity was not known, but authorities now believe it was McLeod.

The family cut off the boy’s communication with the man, and one family member sent a message to tell him to back off. On May 31, the boy’s mother called Escondido police, and the case was assigned to Jackson on June 7, the affidavit says.

The family turned to police again on Monday when the boy didn’t show up for his ride home from school. The affidavit says he had skipped the last two classes of the day.

Police then scrambled to confirm an identity for the man the boy had met online.

As of 4 p.m. that day, all detectives had was a fake name for the suspect and a disconnected phone number. By 6 p.m., they had identified McLeod as their suspect and then tracked his cellphone to a red-eye Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to Tampa.

Los Angeles airport police and federal authorities were alerted, but the boy made it onto the plane. He was traveling under the name of one of McLeod’s relatives, the affidavit says.

The boy’s mother said she spent “an extremely long night” Monday waiting for word on her missing son. Detective Jackson knocked on the family’s door with the news Tuesday that he had been found unharmed and the suspect arrested.